In the last two centuries, the mutual embedding of China in the world and the world in China has been informed and shaped through a number of crises whose historical narrative contours are ever in flux. The problem of narration—Which facts do we use to tell our story? How is the story organized? In whose voice is it told?—constitutes the third and overarching approach of this book. China’s revolutions—or, we might say, revolutions in what we know today as “China”—have, since the mid nineteenth century, raised questions about what “modern China” was to be as a geography or spatial entity, a polity or state, a nationality or cluster of ethnicities, a congeries of cultural entities, a class politics, a gendered sociality, and more. These questions repeatedly forced seemingly settled narratives into crisis. In the Republican Revolution of 1911, for example, the dynastic system and its Confucian ideological underpinnings were rejected as antiquated and unable to answer to the challenges of the capitalist world and its many possible futures. Having come through a century of revolutionary practice, a reworked and attenuated version of Confucian ideology has now been re-embraced by Xi Jinping in the name of the Communist Party as a way to enforce unitary cultural-nationalist pride and social obedience in a severely divided economic and ethnic environment. In presenting this history, it would be a mistake to narrate China as enacting an endless circular return to some primordial origin, or as fulfilling a linear march to a predestined goal. Rather, narrating China’s modern history—as with all such histories in different ways and for different reasons—allows us to explore how concrete actors at particular points actively and repeatedly engaged texts from many places and times, thus compelling ideological and material encounters with traces of China’s past that opened up new imaginings for China’s present and future. What makes these questions modern, then, is the structurally necessary—and not merely contingent—nature of these engagements. “China” becomes “China” in the world through modern revolutions only in the globally entwined material and ideological conditions created for the re-narration of the past in light of new demands on the present and new hopes for the future.
In the course of the revolutions that have remade China in the world, the geographical extent of the fluid borders of the imperial dynastic order were hardened into national state boundaries. The resultant nation is neither timeless, nor natural, nor culturally homogeneous, nor mono-ethnic; its territorial claims are far from universally accepted. Indeed, for more than a century, the contestation over China as a polity and a territory has been a vital problem in and of socio-political struggle, in and of revolutionary process. One major aspect of modern struggles has revolved around the question of who is Chinese and how to be a modern Chinese—a subject of recurring fraught politics, social disputes, and cultural debates. Elements of these conflicts have been bound up, especially in the twentieth century, with the emergent politics of “China” as a state form: Should the state be founded upon an urban-based bourgeois hegemony, a thinly disguised (or entirely undisguised) Confucian patriarchy, a semifeudal agrarian state capitalist bureaucracy, a sociopolitical dictatorship of the proletarian-peasant alliance, a party-state oligarchy, or something else entirely? These were and remain deeply intertwined subjects of fierce struggle at the intellectual, political, cultural, and social levels. They were first systemically broached in the nineteenth century with the challenges posed to the dynastic system and its corresponding version of “Chinese-ness” by successive revolutionary movements, which were intent not on replacing one dynasty with another, but on transforming the entire system along with its underlying social and cultural logics.
A major arena of revolutionary concern and endeavor—particularly after the full-scale intrusion of capitalist production and manufacture into China’s coastal regions in the wake of the Opium Wars of the 1840s and ’50s, and then more insistently after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895—has been the struggle over what constitutes a modern sociopolitical economy. This struggle shaped the entirety of the twentieth century and is still ongoing. The nineteenth-century antecedents to its full systemic articulation fundamentally unsettled the dynastic and global capitalist worlds, so that by the late nineteenth century the problem of economic organization and goals moved to the forefront of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary theorization, in China as elsewhere. Socialism and capitalism have been the two major poles along which this question has been posed and vigorously contested. In the early twenty-first century, these questions, having gone through a century of structural transformation and philosophical dispute, continue to animate the Chinese and global scene.
This book traces how questions of Chinese-ness, modernization, sociopolitical organization, culture, economic thinking, class, gender, ethnicity, and globality became mutually defining aspects of revolutions in China. The structure of the volume is as follows: each of the main chapters presents a revolutionary moment of the past one and a half centuries in chronological and thematic terms, exploring how certain questions emerged and in which forms they came to be repeatedly posed. Between the main chapters are “interludes” that narratively and analytically move from one revolutionary moment to the next, or that fill in episodes that require more concentrated consideration. The book contends that the questions raised in and by the many revolutions of modern China never emerged all at one time, other than once in China’s history: that is, during the revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership of Mao Zedong. In proposing a vision and method for fundamental domestic social-cultural transformation and a simultaneous ideological-structural challenge to the global capitalist system, the 1949 revolution was intended to settle these questions once and for all—if not with firm answers of form and content, then at least with settled approaches to how they should be asked as well as sociopolitically and culturally addressed. The post-1949 emphasis on politics as a mass mobilizational form, on the political primacy of the peasant-proletarian leadership of the party and society, on the relation between national liberation and socialist principles in China and globally, on Third Worldism as an alternative to normative US-led capitalist geopolitics: these and more were posed as genuine attempts to thoroughly uproot the Chinese and global present in favor of an utterly different future. The proposed permanence of these approaches lasted only a few decades. However, 1949 subtends this book as a fulcrum and a historical argument, albeit not as a teleology.
1919, 1949, 1959, 1969, 1979, 1989, 2009, 2019: the “nine years” have a particular claim on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in China. Many anniversaries can be celebrated or forgotten in the name of the “nines.” This book originally was conceived as a way to think the “nines” as history in the centennial year of the May Fourth Movement (1919). While nine is a consequential number in Chinese cosmology and numerology—associated with the imperial throne and with longevity (“nine” and “long,”